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Comment Penrose's Conformal Cyclic Cosmology model .. (Score 1) 612

"One of the great theories of modern cosmology is that the universe began in a Big Bang. It's backed up by numerous lines of evidence, such as the cosmic microwave background and so on"

'over enormous scales of time (beyond 10^100 years), distance ceases to be meaningful as all mass breaks down into extremely red-shifted photon energy, whereupon time has no influence, and the universe continues to expand without event. This period from Big Bang to infinite expansion Penrose defines as an aeon. The smooth “hairless” infinite oblivion of the previous aeon becomes the low-entropy Big Bang state of the next aeon cycle`

Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe

Comment Undetectable Heartbleed bug? (Score 2) 152

by DTentilhao (#46719273) Attached to: Google Chrome Flaw Sets Your PC's Mic Live
"The security flaw in the Chrome browser emerges just as the world is confronting the frightening prospect of an undetectable bug known as Heartbleed, that makes millions of passwords vulnerable to being stolen".

'It is being widely reported in the popular press as well as many technical sites that a Heartbleed exploitation "leaves behind no trace"`. That of course is not true.

SSL Server Test

Submission + - Huawei Tries to Overcome 'Fear of Huawei'

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Documents leaked by former NSA analyst Edward Snowden and published last month suggest that the US government was actually involved in hacking Huawei network equipment in order to spy on China and other countries, including US allies, using Huawei hardware.
Huawei has been working hard to fight the allegations, claiming that security concerns are unfounded and that the company has been caught in a "trade conflict" between the US and China.

Submission + - Theo De Raadt's Small Rant on OpenSSL (gmane.org) 1

Submitted by raides
raides writes: Theo De Raadt has been on a better roll as of late. Since his rant about FreeBSD plating catch up (here), he has something to say about OpenSSL. It is worth the 5 second read because it is how a few thousand of us feel about the whole thing and the stupidity that caused this panic. Enjoy

Comment Waybackmachine on Dr. Mahendra Rao (Score 3, Informative) 86

by DTentilhao (#46695711) Attached to: Stem-Cell Research Funding Institute Is Shuttered
Mahendra Rao, M.D., Ph.D.

"Dr. Mahendra Rao is internationally renowned for his research involving human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and other somatic stem cells. He has worked in the stem cell field for more than 20 years, with stints in academia, government and regulatory affairs and industry. He received his M.D. from Bombay University in India and his Ph.D. in developmental neurobiology from the California Institute of Technology.

Following postdoctoral training at Case Western Reserve University, he established his research laboratory in neural development at the University of Utah. He next joined the National Institute on Aging as chief of the Neurosciences Section, where he studied neural progenitor cells and continued to explore his longstanding interest in their clinical potential.

Most recently, he spent six years as the vice president of Regenerative Medicine at Life Technologies in Carlsbad, California. He co-founded Q Therapeutics, a neural stem cell company based in Salt Lake City, Utah. He also served internationally on advisory boards for companies involved in stem cell processing and therapy; on committees, including as the U.S. Food and Drug Administrationâ(TM)s Cellular Tissue and Gene Therapies Advisory Committee chair; and as the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine and International Society for Stem Cell Research liaison to the International Society for Cellular Therapy." ref

Submission + - Crypto Wars .. (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the 1970s, a group of quirky academics and scientists came up with a means of providing encryption to the masses. America’s National Security Agency went to war with them – doing its best to suppress the emerging technology of public encryption. In the 1990s the US government pushed to have every computer and phone installed with something called a ‘clipper’ chip which would allow the government to break encryption if needed – effectively a back door for the state. They lost that battle and so what we have learnt from the Snowden leaks is how they tried to work round encryption by hacking into companies and other spy-type methods to retain their edge.

Submission + - Online Skim Reading Is Taking Over The Human Brain

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Michael S. Rosenwald reports in the Washington Post that according to cognitive neuroscientists humans seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online at the expense of traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia. Maryanne Wolf, one of the world’s foremost experts on the study of reading, was startled last year to discover her brain was apparently adapting, too. After a day of scrolling through the Web and hundreds of e-mails, she sat down one evening to read Hermann Hesse’s challenging novel “The Glass Bead Game.” “I’m not kidding: I couldn’t do it,” says Wolf. “It was torture getting through the first page. I couldn’t force myself to slow down so that I wasn’t skimming, picking out key words, organizing my eye movements to generate the most information at the highest speed. I was so disgusted with myself.”

The brain was not designed for reading and there are no genes for reading like there are for language or vision. But spurred by the emergence of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Phoenician alphabet, Chinese paper and, finally, the Gutenberg press, the brain has adapted to read. For example, at the neuronal level, a person who learns to read in Chinese uses a very particular set of neuronal connections that differ in significant ways from the pathways used in reading English. Before the Internet, the brain read mostly in linear ways — one page led to the next page, and so on. The Internet is different. With so much information, hyperlinked text, videos alongside words and interactivity everywhere, our brains form shortcuts to deal with it all — scanning, searching for key words, scrolling up and down quickly. This is nonlinear reading, and it has been documented in academic studies.

Some researchers believe that for many people, this style of reading is beginning to invade our ability to deal with other mediums. “We’re spending so much time touching, pushing, linking, scrolling and jumping through text that when we sit down with a novel, your daily habits of jumping, clicking, linking is just ingrained in you,” says Andrew Dillon. Wolf points out that she’s no Luddite but she is now training her own brain to be bi-literate. She went back to the Hesse novel the next night, giving herself distance, both in time and space, from her screens. “I put everything aside. I said to myself, ‘I have to do this,’” she said. “It was really hard the second night. It was really hard the third night. It took me two weeks, but by the end of the second week I had pretty much recovered myself so I could enjoy and finish the book.”

Submission + - Brendan Eich to leave Mozilla .. (forbes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Brendan Eich recently stepped down as CEO of Mozilla, developer of the Firefox Web browser. It may be more accurate to say he was forced out in the wake of a rising boycott against him.

Submission + - EU should switch to ODF standard (europa.eu)

Submitted by DTentilhao
DTentilhao writes: The European institutions should switch to using the Open Document Format ODF as their internal default document format, says Member of the European Parliament Indrek Tarand. Speaking at a meeting of the European Parliament's Free Software User Group (Epfsug), last week Wednesday, MEP Tarand said: "Moving to ODF would allow real innovation, and real procurement.

Submission + - Major Crytograpic Flaw on some new Intel processors (wikipedia.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There is a major cryptographic flaw in some Intel Ivy Bridge processors. A special processor instruction intended to improve you data security is broken on some Ivy Bridge processors. There is a hardware bug inside some of the chips that causes it flake out with an illegal instruction exception when any attempt is made to use the RdRand instruction. You are forced then to rely on deterministic pseudo-random software to configure secure banking etc. This can make it hundreds of millions of times easier to crack your business transactions for example.

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All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin

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